A top Trump administration official today said that the US is going to push back on China's militarisation, asserting that America is unlikely to withdraw from the world in view of the rise of Russia, growth of ISIS and a remilitarising China.
"We're using the US Navy to maintain that freedom of travel through those international waterways," said Sebastian Gorka, the Deputy Assistant to President Donald Trump and key member of his national security and foreign policy team.
He was referring to the freedom of navigation in the disputed South China Sea.
China claims almost all of the South China Sea, including islands more than 800 miles from the Chinese mainland, despite objections from neighbours such as the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam.
"We are going to push back on China's militarisation," Gorka told Charlie Rose of the PBS News.
"Unlike the last administration, we don't give all of our play book away. So there are lots of things that we are doing and will do, but like as someone playing poker, you don't show the other people at the table your hand, and exactly the same happens right now with regard to those that challenge the international order," he said responding to a question.
Gorka asserted that in the first six months, the Trump administration have been sending clear message to China through various actions.
Whether it's through the freedom of navigation patrol, or whether it's through other measures that the global pathways, the veins of international trade are not something to be exploited by the Chinese regime, or to be intimidating their neighbours into trying to close down those channels, he said.
"The idea that they're creating search and rescue bases on these fake Atolls, but instead creating real military bases, that's not good for anybody," Gorka said.
He also said that the Trump administration has great expectations from China on North Korea and it expects Beijing to exert very considerable, economic, political, and diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang.
Noting that Trump is not satisfied with the results, he said this is the reason why on the fringes of the G-20 the US President sat down with the heads of state of South Korea and Japan to take Pyongyang issue back to the UN Security Council.
Additionally, at the end of the G20, Trump had a conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping to tell him exactly what he thought about what China needs to do right.
"So, look, right now we're going to maintain our policy of peaceful pressure with regards to North Korea, hoping that China can step up to the plate, while the president takes no options off the table," Gorka said.
The New York Times recently called him one of the most visible defenders of the administration, especially on matters on foreign policy. In an interview with Fox News last week, Gorka characterised himself as the president's pitbull.
Gorka said in the diametric opposition to the last Obama administration, the Trump administration has whole heartedly embraced what America stands for. "We don't see the world problems as lying at the feet of American foreign policy or our culture, quite the opposite," he said.
"We say as a Judeo-Christian nation, we are part of western civilization, we want to build our relationships with the world on those immutable values that we see as being objective, whether it's with Israel, whether it's with Poland, the Warsaw speech is seminal, we embrace those values, we say that they are true," he added.
"That moral relativism, post secularism, doesn't lead to the kind of world that we wish to see develop. And when America withdraws from the world, it gets to be a dangerous place, whether it's the rise of ISIS, a remilitarising China, Russia invading its neighbors, on and on, and on, American leadership is essential for global safety," he said.
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